AND ANOTHER THING
Is the female of the journalistic species deadlier than the male?
PAUL JOHNSON
Since he took over from the dreary Pre- ston Rusbridger has had a lot of trouble with his women. It is all his own fault for preferring the grunge-hoydens to the bas- bleus. Time was, of course, when the Guardian liked to stress the cerebral rather than the curvaceous aspects of woman- hood. It used to have a particularly grim feature called `Monday Women', which said it all. There still exists in the National Portrait Gallery, though it is now kept under lock and key and shown only on pro- duction of a signed letter from the Lord Chancellor, a group portrait called `The Guardian Women', an amazing production dominated by Liz Forgan's gigantic legs.
Rusbridger changed all that. He has turned the old Balliol adage on its head, and high living and low thinking is now the rule at the Guardian, especially for the sheilas. Shortly after his promotion, Rus- bridger had to arbitrate in a ferocious row between his leading grunge-hoyden, Suzanne Moore, and the outstanding bas- bleu of our time, Germaine Greer. Moore reminds me of what Sydney Smith said when he saw the wife of Dr Grote, Regius Professor of Greek, wearing a turban: `Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque.' When I first saw Moore, I at last under- stood why the Yanks call a woman a broad. What Moore did to annoy Greer I do not now recall, but Germaine, in her sweet way, hit back by accusing Moore of wearing expletive-deleted shoes and 'a bird's-nest hair-do'. I warned Porkie to take Ger- maine's side, but he replied that Moore had a bigger appeal to 'younger women read- ers'. So Germaine, who wrote the Guardian's best argumentative column, walked out. She is now suing the paper for libel. As for Moore, far from being grateful to Rusbridger, she shortly walked out her- self, so there you are.
There is no shortage of outstanding women journalists today; indeed I would say it is a golden age for the inky sisterhood. But they do not write in the Guardian. The deli- cious Minette Marin, the most cerebral, is in the Sunday Telegraph. Melanie Phillips, the most sinewy in argument, is still hanging on in the Observer, amazingly enough the only good writer it has left, and Valerie Grove, our outstanding interviewer, is in the Times. The Murdoch stable also accommodates two of the three fastest young fillies, Kate Muir and Zoe Heller, while Syrie Johnson is in the Standard. Rusbridger, by contrast, goes for the policy of Grunge and Groans. Among his Groaners, whose rage at the human condition oscillates between a high- pitched whine and screams of abuse, are Linda Grant, Decca Aitkenhead and Catherine Bennett, the last of whom is an expert at stalking out of parties the second she detects something politically incorrect. Rusbridger was short of Grungers until recently, when an opportunity arose to acquire the delicate services of Julie Burchill, the Queen of Grunge. Porkie leapt at the chance, and Burchill's arrival was fan- fared by extracts from her autobiography, advertised by the Guardian as `The Life and Loves of a She-Devil', the watchword being `Julie Burchill was born bad'. Sour comment at the office is, 'At last we have acquired a heavyweight woman columnist.'
Or have they? While the Guardian was pursuing a policy of Grunge and Groans, trouble among t'wimmin was brewing at its rival, the Independent. The star of the daily had long been Polly Toynbee, best of all the serious women writers on the Left, whose departure from the Guardian was a bigger blow to its intellectual self-confidence even than the loss of Germaine Greer. Polly is especially precious to me because I discov- ered her when she was 18, just up at Oxford, and published her first diatribe, saying that the Home of Lost Causes was a moth-eaten old fraud. It got her, and me, into frightful trouble with her mother, father, stepfather and other grand relatives, to say nothing of her college authorities. Polly has flourished at the independent, but all is not well at that once sanctimonious organ. It is losing sales and money and there are rows between its controlling agents, David Montgomery, the Ulster Dracula, and Tony `Full of Beanz' O'Reilly, about whether to flog it off. The group has just been joined by Kelvin MacKenzie, to add a note of Frankensteinian dark humour. Almost his first act was to sack the granitic Scotsman who edited the daily, Andrew Man, and replace him, as editor- in-chief of a seven-day paper, by the boss of the Sunday, Rosie Boycott. Boycott is a for- mer magazine editor, where her masculine approach to life and its problems attracted attention. Not that she is a dyke — far from it — but a liking for virile journalism is her mark. At the Sunday she booted out its one world-class writer, Neal Ascherson, pre- sumably because she did not relish his bleeding-heart style. Hence, when she was nominated to take charge at the daily too, Polly Toynbee promptly announced she had had enough.
Whereupon Rusbridger, evidently scarred by recent criticism that he is run- ning a low-class joint, hastily snapped Polly up. That is fine. Polly is a natural Guardian writer and recalls the days when it was a serious newspaper. But what will she make of the present set-up, and in particular how will she get on with Julie Burchill and the other Grungers, let alone the venom-spit- ting Groaners? Will we witness another Armageddon on the lines of the Moore- Greer row, which I recall welcoming at the time with an article headed `The feminist world war has begun'? Burchill rates her- self highly as a street-fighter and boasts she has 'seen off Amazonians like Camille Paglia. But Polly comes from a long line of brainboxes, and is a lady too; and in these kind of scraps I always back the one who knows how to swing a battle-axe in a draw- ing-room.
All the same, for the foreseeable future the archetypal Guardian woman is going to be a pantomime horse, kicking out in all directions. A possible outcome occurs to me which would, at one blow, solve all the paper's current problems. Rusbridger's tenure of office cannot be secure these days, and maybe it would be kinder to put him out of his misery. At the same time, the appointment of a woman to edit a quality broadsheet is long overdue (I don't count the Boycott experiment). If ever there was an outstanding candidate to edit the .Guardian it is Polly Toynbee, who could dig it out of the mire into which it has fallen. So what is the Scott Trust wait- ing for? (Answer: a bit of integrity, to begin with.)
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